


Fading Out of Grey

by ridkey



Category: Thomas Sanders, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Jason how did this happen, M/M, Multi, Violence, superhero au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-07 01:56:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14070363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ridkey/pseuds/ridkey
Summary: Superhero AUIn a city of heroes and villains, Virgil Warden is a loner, a speck of gray among the lights. Refusing to use his powers at all, he stays out of the fights between good and evil, preferring to live a life anonymous. But it can never be so easy, can it? When three world-famous heroes force their way into his life, he'll have to face his past in order to save his present - and his future, too.Currently platonic only.





	1. You wish you could forget

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how this happened. I was just talking to people about this au on Discord, and the next thing I knew I'd finished a prologue. I don't think this is healthy, someone take me to the doctor.

It wasn't like there's a point to it, but I get out of bed anyway. The routine is always the same. Shower, put on makeup, make coffee, force something down into my shrunken stomach, drink the coffee, get outside. 

And once outside it's loud and violent. Explosions aren't uncommon, bulletproof glass shattering onto the cars below. Citizens wear armor under their normal clothes. Bodyguards stand outside every building.

Welcome to heaven, where hell is always at the gate. And these brilliant, beautiful buildings don't hide the fact this city is rotten to the core.

But listen, I have a bias against this place. I always have. This place, this city, this country, even, it's all the same. These heroes say they're fighting for the good of all. Those villains say you'll get everything you want if you just follow them. Cults the both of them. Assholes, all of them.

My name's Virgil Warden. I've always been alone in this rainbow city. I'm gray in a sea of neon. And nobody gives a shit, and nobody gives me any shit. 

I'm probably the safest person in the city. Some people draw attention to themselves just by breathing. Kids going to school are perfect brainwashing targets. Offices get raided. Banks are robbed. The mayor's office is blown up. But you stay in your apartment, and you're just fine. You keep a low profile, and nobody cares.

That's what I thought.

But now that I'm staring down one if the most famous and intelligent heroes in the city, maybe I wasn't as low profile as I thought.


	2. Don't you want to save everyone?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Violence, maybe body horror [not to any protagonists]

Here’s the way the public views supers: Two kinds of people get powers. The first type is kind, selfless, and devoted to the public good. The second are assholes. Those are your options. If you’re a superhero, you’re wonderful, and if you’re a supervillain, you’re probably planning genocide.

No nuance. No sympathy for the devil. No mercy for me.

So I stay out of it. As a civilian, I can be a jerk. I don’t have to step in when something goes wrong. I don’t have to help anyone. I don’t have to hurt anyone either. I can disappear. I can be someone else, someone who doesn’t have powers. And since government funded auto-searches are banned, I may as well not have them.

Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Kind of beautiful.

Thing is, while automatically searching for people with powers - auto-searching, duh - are banned, criminals don’t follow the law.

That’s how I ended up in a giant prison cell, courtesy of some guy named General Jelly-Gun. Heard about the guy before then, yeah, I keep up with the news even if it makes me hide in my closet for days afterwards. My paranoia needs its excuses to exist. 

Yes, this is leading up to what I said before, about Professor Logic. If it wasn’t obvious, this is a long story, the kind I hate to tell. But then, everybody gets choked on the grit in life.

About a hundred people were rounded up. The street of a city block. One minute, I was on the street. I felt the cool of a massive shadow on my neck. I looked up. Was gone. Just like that, I was in a metal room, with a hundred disoriented strangers. Three walls of metal, two stories high, with bars of electricity covering the last side. 

My first thought was, ‘not again’. I’m no liar, I’ve been taken hostage before. Mass abductions aren’t uncommon. But they’re for show. The last deadly mass abduction was before I was born, and even then, only one or two people died before the heroes came. Most villains don’t have the guts to kill people. They know what would happen to them.

Getting kidnapped used to give me panic attacks. Now I just go and slump against the wall, if there is one, and wait it out. Just like I did only a few hours ago.

Two seconds after I sat down, I felt someone sit down beside me. I jerked my head to look at them, already inching away.

When I saw him… He felt familiar. Not like the way you’d forget a face but remember a voice, not like someone I knew. He felt like an archetype. You looked at him, and you felt like you were looking at a father. It wasn’t the dad jeans that gave him away, or the sweater he had tied around his shoulder. It wasn’t his face, though his face messed with me too. It was like his skin couldn’t decide how old he was. Was he 20? 40? He felt like both. Felt like 10 and 50, too. He felt wrong, is what I decided when I got a moment to think about it. Nobody was supposed to be like that. 

“You’re not scared, are you kiddo?” he asked. His voice was light and friendly, and he smiled at me. He looked at me like I was the only person in the room. It made my skin crawl.

“No,” I said, hunching onto myself.

“Well, that’s good,” the man beamed, “Because I’m terrified!” He let out a light but hearty laugh.

I smiled. I have no idea why I smiled. I never smile. But when I heard him make that stupid joke and laugh, I smiled. I should’ve realized then that this man was dangerous.

“So, you get kidnapped often?” the man asked.

The wording made me squint my eyes at him. Valid question, too bad I hate giving information out.

“What makes you say that?”

“Well,” he dragged the vowel out. “You aren’t scared! I mean if anything, you just seem annoyed that you’re gonna be late for your class today, am I right?”

“I don’t go to class.” It hit me what I said a minute too late. That’s what I get for interacting with someone. Less than a minute in and I was already opening up.

He looked, surprised and almost hurt, and I refocused the conversation before he could comment more on my education.

“Yeah, I’ve done this before. I have to pass through Main Street to get to work. Leads to a lot of incidents when I’m getting off work.”

“How many times have you done this?” The man shifted, sitting crosslegged facing towards me. I groaned inside. This was never going to end.

“I dunno.” I waved my hand. “Never bothered counting.” I huffed, and my bangs flew up. “I guess about ten times?”

“Ten times!” His eyes went wide. After a moment, he grinned. “I guess you do have to do this of-ten, eh?” He winked. “Eh?”

I just… looked at him. What do you even say to that? My lips went up and I smoothed the smile away with my hand. But he saw it, and the way he was smiling just made me smile harder. I should’ve known this guy was cursed.

“Aw, look at you!” He cooed. “You’re so cute when you smile!” He leaned closer, a quiet grin on his face. “I bet I can make you smile more.”

With my hand, I waved him away. “Oh, stop.”

“No, I’m serious!” He clapped his hands together. “What do you like? Do you like jokes? I’m good with jokes? Have you heard the one about the monkey? Or what about paper. Do you know why-”

Overhead, static screamed. The man yelped, and covered his head with his hands. I twisted to my feet, one hand throwing out at the ready. Light crawled in together over our heads, a massive screen forming above us. The man gripped my wrist and held on, but my eyes never moved from the image overhead.

With a name like General Jelly-Gun, you’d think he wouldn’t be anything special. Some guy shooting Crofters from a modified water gun - no, that wasn’t what he was at all. His military uniform was the real deal, from Europe several hundred years ago. From the seams of his clothes, black-green ooze seeped like an open wound. He had no mouth, no eyes. His head was a square, floating block of black-green slime. But he spoke regardless.

“I know you’re out there, hero!” The villain’s voice had a sneer in it. “I scanned the entire block where you were last sighted, searching for you. Now I have you in my grasp! You cannot hide from me! My auto-scanners have found you as I promised they would! Now…” He steepled his gloved fingers, and a fat drop of slime pushed out from the wrist. “We can do this the easy way, if you prefer: Surrender. Everything will be fine if you do. But if you don’t…”

He snapped his fingers. Something moved on the walls above me. I looked up. High above us, massive guns pushed from the walls.

“You have ten minutes to surrender, hero,” General Jelly-Gun said. “If you do not, I will kill every person in this room. You, with your superpowered body, will survive, but everyone else…”

He chuckled. 

“Maybe you lot should sort among yourselves who the hero is? I may even reward you for outing him.”

With his laughter growing louder, the screen cut off, and we were left in silence. 

Someone yelled. I heard flesh meet flesh. Fists beat against the walls around us, people screaming. A woman nearby was recording something on her phone, she was crying. A little girl was holding onto her mother, they were both crying. Pointing fingers, cruel words.

At some point, I didn’t know when, my arms had gone over the man beside me. I held him under me, and he was cold in my arms. I pulled away, and he lifted his head, staring at me through his fogged glasses. 

“Kiddo,” he whispered. He tried to smile. “Don’t worry. Nothing bad is gonna happen. The heroes will be here soon! They’ll-”

“There’s not enough time.” My gut flipped at my own words. “They can’t get here in less than ten minutes.”

“But you can’t give up hope!” The man said. “You can’t give in to fear! Please, don’t worry. There has to be a way out of this, there has to be.”

And he was right. I knew he was right. And even though I didn’t want to think about it, I knew what I had to do.

Nobody ever said I was a good person. And that’s alright. I don’t have to be a good person, I just have to get by. This wasn’t any different.

I stood up. Without looking back at the man, I walked towards the electric bars on the far side of the room. Cutting through the crowds, the people were seared into my mind: A man trying and failing to gain order. A family praying together. Numb faces on pacing people who didn’t see anything anymore. People on the phone. People that were going to be dead soon, if the General wasn’t bluffing.

“Where are you going?” Why was the man following me? “Please, stop! Come back! It’s going to be fine!”

I didn’t stop. I marched right up to the bars. People crowded around it, shouting past it at the guards. Some turned as I stormed forward, and moved out of the way. The rest I forced my way through. The skin of my hands were cold against them, and people jerked away from me. 

Behind the bars were the guards, miniature versions of the General. Their heads were cubes that rotated endlessly, their uniforms soft black and old-fashioned. People yelled at them. They didn’t react.

With my heart in my throat, I said, “I’m the one you want.”

No reaction. The cubes rotated, the people screamed. My nails dug into my palms. I could still duck out.

No, I couldn’t.

“It’s me!”

My shout echoed. People talk about a blanket of silence, that wasn’t what followed. There was relief in this silence. Everyone in that hanger held their breath. Every eye that could be on me, was. My legs shook.

The cubes of the guards’ heads stopped rotating, snapped towards me. My throat sealed up. I could only whisper my words.

“I’m the one you want.”

I counted the seconds, one mississippi, two mississippi, three, four, five. 

The bars dropped. As one, the guards moved towards me.

“No! Stop!”

A guard gripped my arm.

“No, no!” The man was screaming. I didn’t look back. “Stop, stop! That’s my son! Stop! Take me with him!”

“Grab him!” Another voice shouted. The guard hauled me forward. I went with them.

“Let me go!” The man shouted. “Stop, please! Virgil!”

I jerked my head around as the other guard gripped my arm. The man was straining against the arms holding him back, one hand reaching out to me.

“Virgil! Virgil!”

I never told him my name.

The bars locked back into place and the guards dragged me down the hall. My mind spun. How did he know my name? How did he know my name? How? How? I had to get my head on straight. Had to focus. Had to escape the guards. But how…?

It took all my effort to focus on something else. I grit my teeth and focused on the clammy touch wrapping through my jacket. Moist and slick, and mindless. No thought behind them but the orders of their master.

I focused on the touch, and I brought out the cold.

My ice crawled up their arms before their primitive minds caught up. It slid up and over their torsos, down their legs, over their heads. I jerked free of their grasp. One’s arm snapped off, but it didn’t react. The ice had swallowed it whole.

Swung my right fist out. Crack, the guard shattered into black chunks. Swung my left fist out, crack, crunch, dead. I stepped over the pieces and strode down the hall.

Last time I had to do this, I was sixteen. Eight years and I haven’t lost my touch.

Sorry, were you expecting some dramatic showdown? Me, sacrificing myself for the lives of civilians? Right, no. I don’t play that game. I’m no hero. Only reason I gave myself up is to escape. The ship he’d stolen had to have escape pods. All ships did, it was standard regulation. These games between heroes and villains, I don’t do that anymore. You can’t play a game you’re not around for. And if he killed those civilians anyway? Well… That wasn’t really my fault, right?

Only problem with ships is I hadn’t had to navigate one since I was seventeen. All the white hallways looked the same, and all the maps had been torn down from the walls. And the only sound was my feet on the fake black tile.

Maybe it was inevitable I’d end up where I did. You could only explore so much of the ship before you found the helm.

The door to the cockpit was open, throwing yellow light out into the hall. As I turned the corner, I was right in front of the windows that stood on either side of the door. I dropped to the floor. My heart hammered in my throat. Had I been spotted? Damn it, I just wanted to get away.

Inside the cockpit, someone spoke.

“Coward. You’re a coward, hero!”

I flinched, one hand grabbing my chest.

“Do you think I was joking when I said I’d kill them all?” General Jelly-Gun screamed. “It’s been over ten minutes.” I peered around the door. He was standing with his back to the door, slamming his fist onto the control panel. “I’ve waited long enough for you…”

My heart stopped.

The guards didn’t come back with me. They didn’t pass on that I’d surrendered. They had no way to. He thought no one was coming.

I couldn’t let him kill the passengers.

“I’ll reveal your true face, hero,” he snarled. 

I pulled my hood over my head. 

“I’ll show who you truly are to the world!”

I zipped my jacket all the way up.

“And we’ll see who’s left the bigger man, you and I!”

I stood. Stepped out.

“And you will regret ever angering-!”

I leaned against the door, and put my smile on.

“No need to be impatient, General. The fun’s not even started yet!”

The General’s head spun around before his body did.

“Who on Earth are you? How did you escape your cage?”

My chuckle was cold, and he didn’t need to know it was fake.

“Me? I’m no one special. I’m just a little someone who turned himself in to the guards and then smashed them to pieces.” I tilted my head. “You need to give your henchmen toys some better brains. Be nice to fight something that’s actually a challenge.”

He stared at me. If he could blink, he would.

“You’re not the hero I was looking for,” He said at last.

I pushed away from the door, straightened up and rolled my neck.

“Well, you got one thing right.” I punched my fist into my palm, ice forming over my hands. “I’m no hero.”

He looked at me - really, really looked at me.

My smile grew wider.

He bolted for a door on the side of the room.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Get back here!”

I strode across the floor, following him through the door, but it was too late. The escape pod dropped through the tube, and the General was gone. I huffed. Now who was the coward?

My gut twisted. The passengers, were they okay? I grabbed my gloves from my jacket pocket and rushed for the command station.

First thing I did was disable the turrets. Only when they were gone did I feel like I could breathe. The passengers were safe, that was what mattered. I swiped the sweat from my forehead. Now, I had to land this thing somewhere.

Looking back on it, I don’t know what I was thinking. Sure, there was an element of self-preservation in my thoughts - if someone didn’t land the ship, it would crash. But that wasn’t all there was to it. I, when alone, when I thought no one was looking, thought of the passengers, and moved to protect them.

And even knowing what I do now… I don’t know what else I could’ve done. 

I’m sorry.

Landing would be easy. The land around us was flat, grass as far as I could see through windows and on the holographic map beside the station. I grinned at it. It hadn’t been too long, right? I still remembered a thing or two from my training. That reminded me of something specific from that training: Keep an eye on the gauges. I scanned the station, noting the placement of each and every gauge.

My gaze landed on the fuel gauge and my smile dropped.

Little something most people don’t know about: The fuel used by an airship is calculated down to the last drop based on the weight of the airship and everything inside it. Without the right amount of fuel, the airship can’t land properly.

Even without doing the math, I knew there was no saving this ship.

My breathing hitched. I saw the knuckles on my hand go white, white as the reflection of my face on the shiny golden metal around me. There was no way to save the ship. Evacuation was impossible - one look at the internal map showed all of the escape pods were gone. The General had taken the last one. The one that should’ve been mine. Wasn’t hard to guess that the other pods were either used by the original owners of the ship, or destroyed in combat.

I looked out over the fields. My blood beat a pattern in my ears. Maybe I swayed in my seat, I don’t remember. Things get fuzzy around the edges when I think back on it. I don’t remember what I did. What I said. What I looked at. But I remember the panic that clawed its way up my throat and the tears that stained my cheeks with black from my makeup.

The passengers were going to die.

I’d exposed myself to save them, and we were all going to die anyway.

My eyes glanced down at the panels. My fingers shook on the dashboard.

“I didn’t,” and my voice sounded far away, “Do all this just to fail right now.”

I wasn’t thinking. I swear, I wasn’t thinking right. This wasn’t like me. This was like I’d been possessed by the person I’d always wanted to be, the person I dreamed of becoming when I cried in pain during the night. I don’t know why I did why I did. It’s totally unlike me.

All ships have electronic shields that protect them. Standard practice, just like escape pods. They can be controlled and directed, and all power will go to them in the event of an emergency. I took a breath. This was an emergency.

There was a switch, covered by a glass case. I flipped it. Rerouted the shields to the area of the ship the passengers were trapped in. I left every other part of the ship vulnerable, including the helm. The switch gave me manual control over almost everything. I took hold of the ship’s direction. It’d be a fast fall. Without the right amount of fuel, slowing down was impossible.

At best, I’d come out of this with some broken bones. At worst, I’d be a smear on what was left of the wall.

I knew this. I accepted it.

Taking a deep breath, I angled the ship down.

“Hang on,” I said to no one.

The ground came up faster than I thought it would.


End file.
